Downriver

Robert Clark

ALTHOUGH I lived in London on and off for the better part of six years, I never went on the river, the Thames, until last October. It was art that drove me to it.

In that earlier time (to be recounted in the volume of my memoirs provisionally subtitled “The Stupid Years”) there was nothing much to recommend it: the Seine, narrowly bisecting the city, unifies Paris; what Paul Goodman called “our lordly Hudson” spans the breadth between the palisades and Manhattan and makes at once a magnificent forecourt and backdrop to the city; and the Tiber, Melville’s “yellow ditch,” is exactly the rusting, scruffy, tired river its venerable city requires. But the Thames is scarcely spectacular and I was otherwise engaged, attending graduate school during the dawn of Margaret Thatcher’s first term. I was, truth be told, in over my head. My British-born cohorts in medieval studies were smarter than I was—or at least wittier—and better prepared: they’d already read things like The Ayenbite of Inwyt; I’d never even heard of it.

All this made me anxious, and much of London must have been lost on me as I rode through its catacombs on the Underground and assuaged my nerves in pubs with names like the Load of Hay and the Coal Hole. There was one—I don’t remember the name—on the eastern flank of Charing Cross Station where I used to brace myself with gin and tonic prior to my daily harrowing in Old English seminar. In retrospect, I realize that the pub must have stood dead above the site of the blacking factory where Dickens toiled miserably as a boy, and beyond that, fifty yards down, was the river and the railway bridge across it, the very bridge and fulminating river of Monet’s Charing Cross Bridge (Overcast Day), a copy of which hung above the living room couch where I once used to lie reading, hour upon hour, year after year, as a boy.

So in spite of my preoccupations of that moment, the river and I were acquainted. I knew it, or at least I knew the painting of it, as I would come to know it later through A Man for All Seasons, Our Mutual Friend, and Little Dorrit, through its imagined cargoes of fog and mud, of watchers standing on the bridges, of saints and the bodies of the dead. Those impressions, gleaned by way of art, may amount to something less than the river itself, or perhaps something more, something adjacent to or skimming over it, beneath or inside it. In any case, twenty-five years later, I finally went on the river in a boat.

There was no deliberation involved. I was simply interested in getting from the old Tate Gallery (now renamed the Tate Britain) upriver near Chelsea to the new Tate Modern on Bankside. I’ve had mixed feelings about the old Tate since first visiting it in my student days. I knew a little about art then, or at least I had the high points of current received opinion nailed down: abstraction was good and figuration was bad, or rather, figuration was an earlier, cruder stage in an evolutionary history that culminated in abstraction, which was the end of the line, an encounter with the thing itself, the picture, art unmediated.

On that view, the Tate was a museum not only of dinosaurs but of evolutionary malformations and failures, of missteps that were almost hilariously wrong. There were rooms full of Victorians and Pre-Raphaelites, paintings that made your teeth hurt, lacquered ruby and emerald candy boxes of saturated color and sentiment. Before such exaltations of corn as Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience or The Light of the World (Jesus out trick-or-treating for souls on Pumpkin Night) you might wince or die of embarrassment. In adjoining rooms, the merely boring portraits and history paintings came almost as a relief. They also bore out an another theory, then newly minted by the socialist critic John Berger: that paintings were at bottom commodities, objects that expressed not eternal verities involving beauty and the good but shabby illusions as old as capitalism itself that disguised the true nature of economic, political, and social relationships. Artworks in themselves—despite what the High Modernist promoters of abstraction might say—had no especially interesting claims to make on the viewer. In fact, it was just the other way around: what mattered was the viewer’s act of looking, the appropriation of the object/artwork by the viewing subject, which enacted socioeconomic pathologies ranging from ownership to colonialism to rape and beyond. The art object understood as, well, art was rather beside the point, Berger said, especially in an age of mass mechanical and electronic reproduction and media, where every commodity was available to everyone everywhere in the manner of national and international marketing and brands.

So it was that I dismissed pretty much everything in the Tate as dull, misguided, and unwittingly complicit in the great crimes of history. I might have blamed the artists, but the artists hadn’t known what they were doing, were themselves the victims of the ideology and false consciousness their paintings celebrated. That my own consciousness might be sullied or its provenances and contents less than transparent to me was not a thought I was willing to credit; that my attitude to five centuries worth of people and their labors was at best a bit condescending did not arise. In fact, the one painting in the Tate that I liked was an exercise in condescension in the original sense of the word. It was a group of heads by Hogarth, more a study than a full-fledged painting, of six of his household servants. I liked the idea, in a quasi-Bergerian sense, that a great master should bother—should condescend—to turn his hand to members of the working class. I also liked that the style was a little rough and unfinished, that the visible brushwork gave it the feel of documentary work, that in spite of the fact that Hogarth in a sense owned these people, he gave them great dignity. But I would have been reluctant to disclose my affection for this painting. It was figurative and, worse, could be described as sentimental, which was, deep in my heart of hearts, what I think I really liked about it: that it seemed to be a manifest outpouring of affection, even love, for these six persons. This was a fierce piece of projection on my part, no less presumptuous than the judgments I’d launched at the rest of the paintings in the Tate, but somehow unspeakable.

I felt on surer ground with the museum’s crown jewels, the Turners. You had to admit there was something to them—in their textured whorls and fusions of color and light. Turner, I thought, might have been fifty or even one hundred years ahead of his time, might have been the first Impressionist, the proto-Abstract Expressionist—might have been, in a word, French instead of English—but he blew it. There were things hidden in these paintings, not just figurations, but figures: awful little stickmen and ship masts and the puffing smokestacks of steam trains.
So Turner for me failed the historical-evolutionary test, but—simultaneously confuting two theories that ought to contradict each other—he also failed Berger’s. His paintings had the reactionary stink of Ruskin upon them, who was their great contemporaneous defender when the public at large thought Turner simply insane. Ruskin’s current reputation in my student years was worse, much worse, than Turner’s was in the early eighteenth century. Ruskin was supposed to have been disgusted and made impotent by the sight of his wife’s naked body and to have been a pedophile, at least in his fantasies. At the same time he was said to be moralistic, reactionary, and religiose, promulgating an art that was relentlessly narrative, figurative, and backward-looking.

I know a little more about Ruskin now. For example, it’s true enough that Ruskin was preoccupied with religion, but mostly as a former believer bereft in his own loss of faith. He was also appalled at the effects of industrial capitalism on the working class—a sort of proto-Berger. As for insisting that art be moral or spiritually uplifting, it would be truer to say he wanted it to be consequential, wanted it to matter not only in itself but as something that necessarily takes us deeply into other things that matter yet more deeply, where we cannot otherwise go, and especially when we cannot or will not believe.

Turner himself apparently paid little notice to Ruskin’s defense of his work. But the paintings bear Ruskin’s ideas out. In their size and mass, their intensity and force, in the particularity evident right down to the specificity of their titles (say, The Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains, in the Island of Saint Vincent, at Midnight, on the 30 of April, 1812, from a Sketch Taken at the Time by Hugh P. Keane, Esquire), the best of them insist upon their own manifest presence and consequence, insist upon themselves, upon what is within and what extends from them.
But that was lost on me then—perhaps I was too busy looking (or thinking about looking) to see it—and had there been a boat at that time to another Tate, consecrated to art that suited my tastes, I would have grabbed it. Now, twenty-five years on, there are both, and I got on. It’s a quick journey that runs every forty minutes. Nor is this just any boat, having been designed, or at least decorated, by Damien Hirst, the young British artist who rocketed to fame and the Turner Prize with pickled slabs of animal carcass enclosed in Perspex boxes. The boat itself resembles a sturgeon or, perhaps, a shark, albeit one with polka-dots on its flanks.

It was scarcely ten o’clock and there were perhaps five of us aboard plus crew (three sailors, a ticket-taker, and a barista). The boat pushed off and headed north and eastward. I have to say that there were no epiphanies for me on the river. It was full of water, and most of the buildings along it—for example, the Houses of Parliament—look better from their landward sides. Like so much of postmodern experience, it seemed a little muffled and unanchored, as though you were taking it in from, say, a sealed Perspex box.

I saw places I recognized: King’s College where I’d been a student; the South Bank arts complex, where I’d attended concerts and plays; and the Thames bridges—Westminster, Waterloo, and Blackfriars. I wondered which was Little Dorrit’s—she who sacrificed everything for a father who could see nothing but himself—the one she’d crossed and recrossed and stood on, waiting, looking out upon the river? That would have been the old Southwark Bridge, which is no more (having been replaced around the time of Dickens’s death). And Little Dorrit herself, of course, never was. Yet the imagined bridge and imaginary character seemed to me more real, more substantial, than anything that stood in their place: the river, not only free of corpses but cleaner today than at any time since the middle ages; the mid-twentieth-century modernist-utilitarian bridges; or the commuters and idlers who trudge across them today. Who were these people? How could I ever know them as I knew Little Dorrit?

If anything pleased me, it was—of all things—the London Eye, the spindly, vertiginous Ferris wheel erected as part of the Blair government’s millennium follies. It was this, rather than the vaunted dome at Greenwich that succeeded with the public, and you see why. The Eye ought to be retrograde and vulgar, and I suppose it was. Yet it sat not so incongruously kitty-corner across the river from the Houses of Parliament and directly in front of County Hall, the one-time Kremlin of London’s left wing labor party. Today, it contains the Saatchi Gallery, the vast contemporary art collection of Sir Charles Saatchi, Mrs. Thatcher’s advertising and marketing advisor and the early champion of the works of Damien Hirst and his ilk. The gallery shares the building with the London Aquarium and Dali Universe, which I am afraid probably is what it sounds like.

Strictly speaking, the London Eye is not simply the “London Eye,” but the “British Airways London Eye.” It’s no great shock that cultural attractions and entities should be marketing opportunities for their corporate supporters, nor that cultural institutions should themselves be marketed, right down to possessing a graphical look and brand indistinguishable from any corporate identity. Britain is well advanced in this development, perhaps surprisingly so, given much of British society’s historic suspicion of capitalism on the leftward hand and of being seen to be “in trade” on the rightward.

The Tate is ahead of the curve on this. At least for purposes of its graphic identity the Tate isn’t even “the Tate” but simply “Tate,” and the museums “Tate Britain” and “Tate Modern.” (There are also, outside London, “Tate Liverpool” and “Tate Saint Ives.”) It’s reminiscent of a corporate identity, and a multinational at that. (As, in fact, the Guggenheim already is.) To me, it seemed that the simple, stark “Tate” called out for a colon followed by a motto—“Better Living through Chemistry,” say, or “The Dog Kids Love to Bite”—and I was trying to imagine what might do the job, but by then we were disembarking.

Landing at the Tate Modern was an altogether more prepossessing experience than leaving what I’d heard Londoners were now calling “the Tate Old.” It’s housed in the former Bankside Power Station, originally opened in 1952 and designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, best known for his classic red London telephone kiosks. Scott’s aim here, however, was entirely different in scale and mood: brown rather than red, dark rather than bright, leviathan rather than intimate in size. He is said to have wanted to build a “cathedral of energy,” and if energy means power, I suppose he succeeded. But if you take energy to mean light, I’m not so sure, for it struck me as one of the darkest, most brooding, and most melancholy buildings I have ever seen. I guess you could call it modernist insofar as it was devoid of ornament, but beyond that, it seemed less an exercise in form and line than in mass, in weight and gravity. I later found out the building consists of 4.2 million brown bricks. It’s been called Orwellian, in that it might easily house one of 1984’s anonymous, looming, secret government ministries. For me, however, it seemed to embody Orwell’s pervasive sense of loneliness, futility, and isolation. If you were to erect a cathedral to these things, Scott’s might be it.

Just off the boat, in front of the museum, however, there were balloons, inflatable sculptures not dissimilar to those you see in Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. Balloons are inherently comic and foolish—they haven’t quite got their feet on the ground, after all—and I thought these would be true to that form. They had silly names—Blockhead (whose head is a cube) and Daddies Bighead (which is pink and long-necked with a carrot nose)—and a manifest, rubbery absurdity. But as I came closer, as they towered over me, I felt a bit menaced. That, too, goes with balloons: anyone of a certain age will recall the roly-poly inflatable clowns with rounded bases designed to right themselves no matter how hard or how often you knocked them down. At a certain point the clown’s refusal to stay down becomes a kind of taunt, a mockery in which the joke’s on you, in which by continuing to punch the grinning fool you become the instrument of your own humiliation.

I’d have had no chance of so much as landing a dimple on these, designed by the American artist Paul McCarthy. If their moorings broke and a wind came up, one of them might have pretty easily crushed me. Had I been a child (and that perhaps was my role in relation to the balloon, since it knew something that I didn’t), I might have feared it would chase after me. The implicit threat seemed real. These were not friendly balloons. They did not like—or the creator or consciousness that made them does not like— balloons themselves, or the kind of people who like balloons in the usual sorts of ways. They were, I realized, mean and angry balloons—mean and angry about their own humiliation—and what they knew that you did not know is that you are stupid. You are the clown. I fled inside.
There was something about the vast blank mass of Scott’s building that I think compels one to find out what’s inside it, to know if it’s solid or hollow and to what extent. As I entered, the original turbine hall opened up just beyond the doors. There was a bridge extending out into the hall that ended just short of the south wall. It went nowhere, so I looked out into the space beneath me and turned back. The hall was narrower than I imagined, but both taller and longer. There was some kind of installation—a cloud of yellowish swamp gas perhaps—in the east end, but I was anxious to get to the main galleries, which you enter not through the turbine hall but by elevators and stairs just before it. I wanted to get to the art.

The Tate Modern has seven floors, which overlook the Thames on one side and the turbine hall on the other. Most of the galleries are on the third, fourth, and fifth floors and are arranged not by period or provenance but by artist (Richter, Warhol, Beuys, Kiefer, Rothko, Nauman) or, more often, theme (“The Mechanized Body,” “Naked and Nude,” “Subversive Objects,” “Trash into Art”). This approach had some appeal for me: in museums, I’d too often felt myself enduring the chronological trudge through room after room (Only two more centuries to go, I’d sigh), so despite the criticism the Tate curators have received for this approach, I was amenable to it. Perhaps, I supposed, by freshening things up, by rearranging the furniture, these curators would make the scales fall from my eyes; my objections, prejudices, and received ideas which had been such a burden at the old Tate would give way to appreciation, even to engagement, to encounter.

I liked some of these and could make little of others. Too often, the connections among the works seemed either tenuous or facile. Sometimes I felt I was walking through a flea market waiting for my eye to alight on something of interest, something I needed amid all the extraneous objects. At points, I might have been floating past them, abstracted.

I was, I realized, at some kind of remove from the art, or it from me, by several layers: the juxtaposition of the works seemed more important than any one of the objects, and the idea behind the juxtaposition—the interpretation brought to bear on them collectively—mattered most of all. The organization of each gallery was meant to bring you closer to the artworks within it, but in some unintended—or, for all I knew, intended—way pushed them further away into the realm of a second or third-order experience. They were walled off behind theory, interpretation, and educated taste.

When I reached the galleries dedicated to individual artists, I assumed this would cease to be an issue. What’s not to like, after all, about a roomful of Rothkos? If, that is, you like Rothkos (as I do)—and there’s the rub. Because in these galleries too, it seemed to me, the artworks were secondary—in this case to the artist, or rather to his or her current celebrity. This suits Andy Warhol, who said that “art is what you can get away with.” In a gallery devoted to him, Warhol can get away with a lot, and this is fine since with him any one work is always subsidiary to the phenomenon of the artist himself: Andy is always larger than the sum of his art.

It was otherwise with Rothko. Especially on the heels of Warhol or most of the other artists the Tate Modern finds significant, the paintings cancelled each other out or failed to deliver something I’d gotten accustomed to in the other galleries: the context of the artist as personality or at least presence. The Rothkos offered only their own presence. I thought that what the room needed to anchor it, to contextualize it in the manner of the other galleries, was an image of Rothko’s suicide note. Of course, Rothko did not leave a suicide note. He merely left his paintings.

The artists I saw in adjacent rooms did not have this problem, particularly the young British ones: I’ve mentioned—I’d sailed with him—Damien Hirst; but there were also Tracey Emin (Fuck You Eddy, 1995; Cunt Vernacular, 1997) and Chris Ofili (Double Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars, 1997), who’d also been part of the Sensation exhibition that had scandalized portions of New York a few years ago. None of their work scandalized or shocked me, which I guessed meant I had missed the point. Or, in hindsight, precisely gotten it.

Shock, it occurred to me later, was supposed to be the stock-in-trade of the Tate Modern: the wake up call, bucket-of-cold-water-in-the-face, you-can’t-handle-the-truth epiphany (whether you want one or not) of unmasking and deconstruction. It’s a twenty-first-century updating of Conrad’s artistic manifesto, “to make you see,” an exercise in courage and audacity for both artist and audience. Except I don’t think the viewer is meant to be shocked in any genuine way. No one was more shocked by Sensation than Rudolph Giuliani, but his shock simply proved that he didn’t get it. Rather, I suspect the ideal viewer is supposed to see that the work would be shocking to someone less au courant than he. But since the ideal viewer does get it—grasps the artist’s intention, appreciates the validity of the interpretation the painting is meant to enact—he or she is not meant to be shocked, but to be, in truth, complacent.

John Berger would be absolutely right about this kind of work: there was an exchange relation between object and viewing subject, and it was based on a mutually accepted interpretation, a shared ideology, between artist and audience. The work congratulates you on your inability to be shocked and your capacity to understand “difficult” work, and then accords you hipness in exchange for your admiration. It’s a square deal, because with contemporary art almost all of us feel insecure about our taste and knowledge, and contemporary artists want—much more than to shock, I think—to be liked.

I noticed there was an awful lot to read at the Tate Modern. Not simply title cards and catalogs, but yards of artist statements, biographies, and manifestoes. There were probably as many documents hanging on the walls as there were paintings. Perhaps that’s because so much of this art is almost wholly contingent on interpretation for whatever power it has. It has to do with what the artist means it to be, not what the work seems, never mind is. The intentional fallacy (that staple of school book reports, “What was the author’s intention and did he achieve it?”) is no longer fallacious. The art is a kind of secondary literature designed to explicate the artist.
That’s not to say there wasn’t skill and even talent on display, but it seemed to be chiefly in aid of steering the viewer back to further interpretation. Perhaps that was why so much of the work in the Tate Modern seemed a little forlorn and lonely, a bit beside the point. For me, the apotheosis of this feeling was reached in the rooms devoted to Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, two painters the Tate curators believe are among the most important of our time. I could find nothing in their work that engaged my mind, my heart, or my sight, although it seemed it surely ought to. You might have said it smelled and tasted and even looked like art, but somehow it wasn’t. The works seemed to me, in fact, perfect replicas of art, hollow-eyed bodies without souls.

It could be that this was the intention behind them, and were that the case, they would possess a kind of genius. Because for me at least, this is how so much of the way the world seems, upriver and downriver, and perhaps that is the way it has always been, at least on and along the river—for Thomas More and George Orwell and (for what is the use of distinguishing art from history if this is true?) Little Dorrit.

In any case, at the Tate Modern, caught on the treadmill of interpretation, sworn to the sweetheart deal between artist and viewer, judgments are pretty much impossible, as are questions of what is or isn’t art. There’s no ground on which to object: it’s been removed. And it’s pointless to say that the emperor has no clothes, since in so many of these works, the artist (or bits of her, or her friends, or her apartment) is naked. You can criticize this work, but you will find yourself doing so in the very terms of the work itself. You open your mouth and what comes out, almost against your will, is something clever and self-regarding and knowing, a pose rather than an opposing position.

The last room I visited upstairs at the Tate Modern was devoted to Bruce Nauman. The centerpiece, for me at least, was a video of Nauman naked, wearing boxing gloves, beating himself up. Or at least you suppose it’s Nauman (the documentation on the wall would explain everything). He pants, flails, sweats, perhaps even bleeds (you can’t tell from the graininess of the video, although the grain itself gives the piece an extra coating of tawdriness). It’s appalling, but not in the sense of tragedy. It’s like watching a psychotic responding to the imaginary voices he hears inside his head, cursing himself and picking at his raw skin. It goes on and on, like the malicious self-righting clown balloon I’d been thinking of earlier. It’s pathetic, but who has the last laugh here?
Perhaps Nauman and his victim (for what else could you call the person in this piece?) are forcing an epiphany on the viewer, and perhaps this one is meant to reverse the positions of object and viewing subject, just as the inflatable clown does. You watch, transfixed by the hatred and pitifulness and anger, and you become the fool, the self-consuming idiot machine that is doing this to itself. The person in the video seems to be saying to itself, “You piece of shit,” but maybe it is speaking to and of you.

Or look at this work—or pretty much anything at the Tate Modern—from Berger’s perspective. (I had been thinking a lot that day about Berger, Berger and his apostate protégé Peter Fuller, who founded the neo-Ruskinian journal Modern Painters and died in an accident at the age of forty-three.) If you, as the viewer, bring the work to life, set it in motion, then it is you who are causing this suffering. You are a piece of shit, twice over.
In one of his first dissents from Berger, Peter Fuller quoted his teacher as follows: “The spiritual value of an object, as distinct from a message or an example, can only be explained in terms of magic or religion. And since in modern society neither of these remains a living force, the art object, the ‘work of art,’ is enveloped in an atmosphere of entirely bogus religiosity.” Perhaps that applies here: Nauman’s piece was a reimagining of the crucifixion: mankind kills itself in the likeness of man/God, but no one and nothing is saved.

Fuller (himself an atheist like Berger) thought that “the material basis of the ‘spirituality’ of works of art is not so easily dissolved,” but elsewhere quoted Hans Kung to the effect that “art is seen no longer against a theistic but against a nihilistic background.” That seemed to me closer to the facts of the art I’d seen. The liturgy of this place was black, a sacrament of contempt and annihilation. Even in less obviously dark works—the glib and facile art of the Sensation artists or Sigmar Polke—their intentional superfluity and triviality guided you not to insouciance but to despair. Promising you hipness, it invited you to ascend the heights and throw yourself off.

I went to the escalators, feeling dejected and stupid because I so obviously failed to understand this art. As I descended I thought I knew how the complete-with-colon identity/motto of the Tate Modern ought to read: “Tate Modern: Art That Hates You.” But because I am no different than anyone else, because I am no better than this place or the people it was designed for, I went to the museum store, to take solace in shopping. There were a lot of postcards (I bought none—there was nothing I wanted to remember) and even more books, catalogs, journals, and magazines. The glossies of some future world, I browsed these with little comprehension. They and the books and catalogues were full of tattoos, piercing, and younger, more attractive people “doing” each other or simply showing themselves.

None of it was pornography. You could tell that by the quality of the graphic design and paper stock. And whatever embarrassment I felt arose not from the tension between prurience and conventional morality, but from my inability to get what I was seeing. But I could not help feeling that almost everything I was puzzling over had at its heart the aim of someone selling themselves. And that is the basic definition of pornography, “prostitute writing.” The artwork in these books and magazines seemed, like so much of the artwork upstairs, always to refer back to the artist, to the brand of his or her personality. You would want, of course, to see the merchandise before you bought it, so all the nudity was understandable.

Maybe what I misunderstood is that there is no longer a boundary between the artist and the work, that they are one thing, coextensive and coterminous, a performance that ends only when the artist dies, or simply when no one notices him anymore. Which perhaps explains the relentless need for publicity, attention, and the need to outdo every other artist in novelty and sensation. This is interesting in the way that gossip or new trends or product introductions are interesting—in the manner of shopping. So Berger is right after all, save for the fact that it is not just the artwork that is a commodity, but the artist as well, and the viewer—merely by a glance, by window-shopping—is culpable in his exploitation.

I don’t expect art to supply the eternal verities any more, to be a portal to the transcendent. I’d just like something to look at, something definitively and emphatically itself, something to make me see beyond reference and interpretation and through the Perspex shield of dislocation. Something that manifests the fact of itself and the fact of me, and if it were lovely or moving or unexpected, that would be nice too. I would settle for that.
I left the bookstore and climbed a set of stairs to the exit level. I was back on the bridge overlooking the turbine hall. Below me there were several dozen people—fifty or one hundred, perhaps, given the size of the area—not waiting or milling around, but standing quietly or sitting, even lying down on the floor, simply looking at the installation I had noticed in passing on my way in. I looked up at it. It was a sort of huge sun seen through mist or clouds. Or a ball of yellow and russet light. Or the egg-shaped, luminous head you think is the Wizard of Oz until Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal that it’s only a con-man and self-promoter from Kansas, a manipulator of images.
I was stumped. I couldn’t even figure out what media were involved. Perhaps one or more projectors and some fog machines. But you couldn’t penetrate the artifice. It just hung there, stubbornly. The best I could do by way of description was to say it was a Turner sun that had floated free of the canvas. It was, I had to admit, well, beautiful. But that couldn’t be, could it? Not here, at the Tate Modern.

I went outside, past Paul McCarthy’s inflatables. I had read in a brochure inside the museum that McCarthy’s work unmasks the nature of domestic family life through “representations of violence, sex, and defecation.” I tried to amuse myself by imagining getting in touch with the Tate trustees with my idea for a slogan. Maybe they would pay me. Maybe my name would get around.

I continued walking east along the riverbank, under the anchorage of Southwark Bridge into Southwark itself. I was looking for whatever might be left of Marshalsea, the debtor’s prison where Little Dorrit’s father was supposed to have been imprisoned (as Dickens’s own father was in real life). Little Dorrit’s father was a self-important man who liked to be considered a legend in his own time, who had been jailed there so many years that he was known as “the father of the Marshalsea.” He always insisted that he had “expectations” of a fortune, that he was a gentleman brought low by bad luck, by a world unwilling to appreciate his special distinction and gifts.
Little Dorrit devoted her childhood and adolescence to supporting her father and her elder sister (who was going to be a famous musician), so effaced that no one even called her by her name. She is merely the youngest—thus the “Little”—of the Dorrits. She had only the view of the river from the bridge for diversion and solace. When I found the site of the Marshalsea, I saw there was nothing left of it but a piece of wall, marked by a small plaque. So much for history, real and imagined. But, going on my way, I discovered that the adjacent street is named Little Dorrit Court. Now tell me that Little Dorrit, a mere piece of art, a figment of an imagination, is not real.
There’s no accounting for taste. And you can’t argue with the Tate Modern. It’s too big. Scott’s Bankside Power Station is indeed a cathedral—the seat of a reformed art that places its trust in the word (of interpretation, of publicity) rather than in images. Heresy is beside the point, because any criticism is assumed to be—and quickly seems to become—mere reaction. The fundamental premise of the place is that everyone has an agenda, covert or overt, and the covert one is the true one and certainly the more interesting. And you have one too. It’s the only way of being someone in this world.

In my hotel room, shuffling through the brochures and manifestoes I’d gathered, it seemed to me that I had an agenda too. Or at least that I was at fault in some way. That, in the manner of sin, I was complicit from the very beginning. My inability to see or take satisfaction from what I saw was, if not my choice, my responsibility, and perhaps it was of a piece with my view of everything, of creation and its creatures. Maybe I should be attending to what Ruskin said: “You will never love art well till you love what she mirrors better.”
So it is a matter of love, of faith and devotion. And of labor, even struggle: listen to—of all people—John Berger, now an old man living in the Haute-Savoie of France, in a recent essay called “Steps towards a Small Theory of the Visible”:

When I say the first line of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our father who art in heaven...,” I imagine this heaven as invisible, unenterable but intimately close. There is nothing baroque about it, no swirling infinite space or stunning foreshortening. To find it—if one had the grace—it would only be necessary to lift up something as small and at hand as a pebble or a salt-cellar on the table. Perhaps Cellini knew this.
“Thy kingdom come...”: The difference is infinite between heaven and earth yet the distance is minimal. Simone Weil wrote concerning this sentence: “Here our desire pierces through time to find eternity behind it and this happens when we know how to turn whatever happens, no matter what it is, into an object of desire.”
Her words might also be a prescription for the art of painting.... Today, to try to paint the existent is an act of resistance instigating hope.

Some weeks after I came home, I began hearing media reports from England like the following: “Go into Tate Modern these days and you will find crowds of visitors in the Turbine Hall. They are standing, sitting on the floor, virtually camping out. And they are there to look at, you might even say worship, The Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson.” So that was the name of my indescribable Turner sun. The BBC reported that it was the biggest thing ever to happen at the Tate Modern, logging one million visitors in two months. I began to see it mentioned in the American press. Someone compared the crowds to the kind that descend on the site of a miracle or a Marian vision.

It seemed that Scott’s Turbine Hall may have indeed become another sort of cathedral altogether. Although perhaps only momentarily: for the next installation the Tate curators have turned the hall over to Bruce Nauman. Still, I cannot but see Olafur Eliasson’s artwork and the public’s response to it as “an act of resistance instigating hope.” But hope, like faith, must be remade—re-envisioned—every day.

It takes looking, I suppose. Some way through Little Dorrit, it transpires that the Dorrits do inherit a fortune and do become famous for doing so. They move to Venice in order to be fashionable. Little Dorrit doesn’t like it. She’d rather take her solace on the Thames. But she makes what she can of what’s at hand, takes a balcony for her bridge, the lagoon for a river, and a Turner sun to look upon:

She would watch the sunset, in its long low lines of purple and red, and its burning flush high up into the sky: so glowing on the buildings, and so lightening their structure, that it made them look as if their strong walls were transparent, and they shone from within. She would watch those glories expire; and then, after looking at the black gondolas underneath, taking guests to music and dancing, would raise her eyes to the shining stars.


Visit Robert Clark as Image Artist of the Month for November 2008.

Issue #42• Spring/Summer 2004